Nintendo Ad May Have Revealed New, Slimmer Wii U GamePad

An ad posted on one of Nintendo’s YouTube channels advertising Mario Kart 8 may contain our first glimpse of a newer, slimmer Wii U GamePad. The discovery was first made by Kotaku’s Brian Ashcraft, who noticed that the GamePad in the ad looks oddly thinner than the behemoth currently sold with the system.

We never get a clear shot of the controller in the commercial – the blurry one you see in the featured image is the best available – but it certainly doesn’t look the same. In the comparison image below, also courtesy of Kotaku, you can see that the bezel is clearly much smaller, and it even appears a lot thinner than the current iteration. The screen appears to be larger as well, but that could be an illusion caused by the smaller bezel.

For the brief few seconds we see the controller on-screen, it’s heavily blurred and hard to make out any details about it. We can also see the GamePad briefly for a second from the other side (pictured below), which looks awfully similar to the current GamePad in size, however.

From this angle it certainly looks like the standard GamePad.

Whether or not this really is a brand new GamePad, just some editing to make the controller not take up so much room on-screen, or an optical illusion thanks to fast movement and blur: the GamePad could definitely use a revamping. Its screen was already pretty poor when it was released, and that issue is only more prevalent now two years on. The GamePad’s weight, which has also been a glaring issue for most gamers, would presumably benefit greatly from a slimmed down model as well.

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